Our Lips Are Raw with Petals and Pomegranate
by Austennerdita2533
Summary: Caroline is a spring darling who's tired of living a half-life where things are always green, where the sun's always warm and tepid against her dirt-stained hems. Klaus is a god-king stuck in a hollow maze of darkness and doubt, longing for a taste of life he'll probably never see except in clouded dreams. But perhaps more wonders are meant to be unearthed? (Hades & Persephone AU)
1. Fill Me with Your Kissing Death

**A/N : I wrote the first part of this for Klaroline AU Week over on Tumblr, and while I always intended for there to be a second part, inspiration and ideas were lacking until recently. But alas, I finally finished it after the darn thing hibernated on my computer for months, so here we are with the final product all together in one place.. *Yayyy***

 **First up, we have the Caroline POV. Enjoy!**

 **xx Ashlee Bree**

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Long ago, back in the days when wolves still trotted and crouched low in her honeysuckle eyes, hungry for something with no name but afraid to prowl too close to the surface of desire, midnight rose like a chariot from a tomb to tickle the soles of Caroline's feet. It tilled the earth. Exposed her lampshaded dreams like cartilage. Snapped denial against her two bony kneecaps until she screamed out the letters of her own fate. The rattle roar of ghosts she'd long refused to know stepped out from graves beneath her skin. They zipped into her throat with ease because they were no longer shunned for their shouts which demanded wicked mercy; they were no longer lonely. Cracking open the dual riot in her heart.

Midnight vined her through with darkness pronged in hush. All of that guileless power licking love into old scars until they felt jagged and whole again instead of split open and dripping red with shame. It happened at a time when hunting for blood was deemed wrong for any spring darling, because ' _sunlight should be enough to fill up anyone who's been blessed with a green raindrop touch_ '; but also in a moment when Caroline could no longer crush the wildness inside. That part of her desperate to grow thorns from her thumbs…that part _dying_ to poison herself with the freedom to seethe.

She'd grown weary of lying. She'd grown so sick of pretending to flourish in a half-life where she spent all her time courted only by the warmth of the sun. For what of the moon? Or of the knifing feeling of night as it's swallowed like ice through the lungs of the guilty?

What about the withering of seeds after August's multitude of sins have sucked out all the colors except grey and black? How about the rickety quiet of branches swaying somberly because they've paid for their crimes in crumpled brown leaves? Why should it be so wrong, Caroline wondered, yet feel so right, to harness Nature's brutal tools? Why should it be so terrible to bury the weediest of weeds back beneath the dirt where they belonged?

What if— _what if it wasn't_?

Stunted, that's how she felt. Stuck _._

Her head spun and spun in clouds too bright. Her chest heaved, gasping for a squall that tasted of swords and teeth and sweat instead of a rain scented in pinks.

Deep down, Caroline craved transformation and piquancy because she knew she needed more room to cultivate the dueling extremes the gods had planted inside of her. She needed a different kind of garden. One that'd accommodate her bloom-wilting, shiver-burning, rain-droughting ways because the pleasure to shine wasn't enough anymore.

The sun felt muted.

One-dimensional.

Uninspired.

Warmth was too tepid, too predictable…

 _It would never fill her up_. _It would never be enough._

Caroline needed nightfall, too. She needed fog and shadows and obscurity. She needed the enigma of the moon with its various phases and cratered multiplicity.

She required the chill of the wind's tendrils scraping through her bones with a whistle which wakened to widen the marrow, fattening her full of vigor and vice. She wanted the heaviness of souls to press down and burden her shoulders with questions. With emotion. With finality. She wanted penance for sins to blister across skin like ivy because sometimes suffering was payment, because sometimes suffering was the only justice.

She craved the flavor of revenge sliding through her teeth, along her gums, and she longed for it to boil and bake and brew in her blood without guilt before erupting to penalize the deserving with pain.

 _She wanted everything_ —she was over feeling half-enough.

 _Done_.

Yes, the time had come to seek sanctuary for the defiant aconite seeds which were frozen in her gut. Caroline needed to nourish them in deeper soil where both she, and they, could come into their own and _thrive._ The time had come for her fear to fall. For her fists to rise. For the hollowed-out roots of her spring-stasis life to be pruned and snipped away for good so only her punishing purple petals survived.

And so, as a flock of bluebird-ravens wreathed 'round her head chirping a song about beautiful wraiths, the squishing grass between her toes sounding less and less like a place she yearned to call home, she approached the Forest of Forgotten Age with determined footsteps and ambition to claimed what she was owed.

"I know who I am," she said, "and I choose power. I choose instinct. I choose to chase after the missing pieces I still need."

Caroline followed the stars, the eerie wood before her sparkling with serendipity, with eventuality.

A horn sounded when she passed through a bouldered gate as if to confirm that she'd left spring behind for good and had finally found the leafless ground where she was meant to be. Lowering her head, kissing the bundled green stems she carried in her hands, she knelt before the enchanted Unseen Tree to plant her dandelion offering like a wish. She waited for Mr. Midnight himself to come. She waited for him to convey her over the threshold and into the undulating world below, sweeping her into the black magic of moonlight like a bride.

"Touch me, I am ready to burn," she recited in a whisper. "Take me, I am ready to turn. Teach me how to command my extremes, and I am yours to adore in the realm you rule beneath my earth-sodden feet."

"Like a Sun Queen who falls to kiss the horizon each and every night, I want both light and dark in my life," she went on. "I need a world where both blood and mercy collide, where love still wins but hate's a battlecry."

Her heartbeat was as percussive as a clang of bone on obsidian.

"It's why only a hybrid home like the Deadlands can shelter me. It's why only _you_ can stop time to take me in—saving me, enriching me."

Her narcissus soul was ablaze with hope, with hunger. Veins pulsated, thick and green and bulbous, in the whites of her eyes until they looked almost black.

"I appeal to you, King Klaus, Kindred of the Damned. Save me with your killing breath; fill me with your kissing death," she said feelingly, her fingers clawing into the molten dirt like talons. "Please, free me from this half-lived hell!"

The ground cracked under Caroline's muddy palms as she spoke.

Blades of grass parted like a greasy cowlick to reveal a black mouth where a blanket of green used to be. Through the cracked lips, a whisper of smoke snaked left then right before reaching up and out to handcuff her wrists in silk; thumbing a path up her arms, along her ivory neck, across her apple'd cheeks. It caressed her sweetly, possessively, tickling her skin as it encircled her head like a crown.

The smoke feathered across her forehead, its edges thinning until they were no wider than an eyelash that could prick its way inside softly and open her mind to a land of bone and snow, of flame and ghosts, and of thorns which curled and swooped to form dead rose bush thrones. It wove white lily skulls under her skin. It galloped images of cobalt castles made of glass, fire-breathing horses, silver chariots, and scepters stained in ichor, through her thoughts. It rolled mint under her tongue to give her a taste of the Deadlands' crisp power.

Then slowly, smoothly, the smoke pulled back and let her go. Like a vanishing serpent, it sunk back beneath the chasmed ground from where it sprang, leaving her with nothing except memories of grandeur, yearning, and a small trifle which rested atop the dirt like a stone.

Round, thick, juicy, and rich with color, the object glistened at Caroline like a weeping ruby and hummed a kind of skeleton melody. The music called to her; it beckoned. And before she knew it, she'd plunged her arm into the center of the Unseen Tree's trunk and closed her hand around it, squeezing.

"I'm all yours now. And you…you are all mine. But the Deadlands?" she said as she plucked the item loose with a tug and raised it into the air. "I'm afraid _that_ you'll have to learn how to share."

Lowering Death's forbidden fruit to her mouth then, she bit into it hard. Her canines pierced the frostbitten rind with a smile that sliced as she added, "Say hello to your new Queen of Midnight."

It was in that moment, and with that one bite where she was able to savor Free Will's taste as it spilled across the blade of her tongue, dripping endless Time down her chin, that Caroline not only swallowed an entire kingdom of riches and ruin, but also a destiny that'd open her pomegranate heart to the wonders of the dark. And to Klaus. For, in him, she found not a god, but a mate who filled her half-empty parts with a violent love that would never die.

And _the rest_ , as they say, _was history._

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 **Comments are lovely. xx**


	2. Drain Me of This Blushing Neglect

**Klaus's POV**

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Many eons ago, in a land rife with sharp, barbed edges which were thicker than mountain bone yet more slippery than a snake's shedding skin, and throughout a kingdom forged out of tinted glass the color of dragon's breath and oppressive temperature swings that clattered teeth or beaded flesh with sweat, a god-king paced the dim crooks and corridors of his home at all hours like a wraith. And like a wraith, he floated through his duties and demands. Lost to all dreams of delight.

It was during a time when loneliness still cracked hard along Klaus's knuckles as well, charring blood between his bones until it drained into deeper pits of nothing because there was only empty air to hold, because there was only that whistling despondency around each muscle, around each tendon of his fists. It was in a moment, too, when midnight felt like a silk rope around his neck: exquisite in its strength and power to bind, but so tight he wanted to choke while his fingernails pried at the prickly coffin. Crying out for a rose-snowed droplet of life. Gasping for the swell of cerulean waves and dawn's preening feathers.

As he skulked beneath the dense fog of another unbearable death-day one evening, however, a yellow daisy suddenly appeared like a vision to slip through the full but dark moon above his head. With naught but a single petal, it slithered open the center with a flawless vibrancy that made it impossible for him to blink. Eager, it seemed, to dig itself through the earth's dirt and worms so it could wilt somewhere against the austere rock below, near his feet. Perhaps even die. For, there, in the Deadlands, the only water which existed came from tears which weren't plucked—never plucked—but scratched from a cemetery of miserable, tormented, bloodshot eyes.

Klaus monitored the daisy's progress with rapt attention. Curious, of course, but also flummoxed by the crumbling stones of the plum sky which fell to the ground like droplets of hail as the petal sliced its way inside. Humming vivid streaks of moisture atop blunt peaks and ashy ravines. And also illuminating the air with songbird waves that were slowly taking form. Down the center of the moon the flower cut with smooth purpose and precision, seeping into the Deadlands with a gush so it could unfurl all its spring curves before him like a million rays of honey slipping from a budded sheath.

It expanded toward him in silky green leaflets first, and in peachy feminine limbs second. Revealing to him, not a flower, but a garden of a woman not yet in full bloom. A sagacious, cheerful young woman, who, like him in a complementary way, was an outcast in a cosmos where multifaceted hopes or ambitions were stifled—blackened until they could no longer breathe. And yet…

The young maiden planted herself before him like a partially eclipsed tree: half shaded, half shining rays of gold.

"Sorry if the light stings a bit, but you'll adjust to it in time. And to me," she said, beaming. "My name's Caroline, by the way."

Like a perfectly off-kilter dichotomy, she then offered Klaus a sprite " _hello_ " with no bow. Unafraid, it seemed, to match him eye-to-eye; nor to face him, toe-to-toe.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I thought it proper to introduce myself." Caught off guard, all he could do was blink. "You know," she added with a flippant hand gesture plus an anxious bounce of her toes, "since I'm to become queen and everything?"

"Truth be told, love," he sighed and scratched the back of his neck, "I don't recall placing an order to the Sky for a midnight bride, so I'm at a loss here. What are you saying? And how did you manage to squeak through the gates of my home without prior—ah, what's the word?"

"Death?"

"I was going to say invitation," he said with a twitch of his mouth, "but frankly…yes."

"Oh, that." Caroline rolled her eyes then snorted like the answer was obvious. "I came of my own volition, silly! I found and ate your lovely forbidden fruit."

"You…you _what_!?"

"No need to pretend to be shocked or anything. That pomegranate was a devil to procure, sure, but not impossible by any means. (Personally, I think on some subconscious level, you hoped someone would find it and that's why you didn't obscure it from view completely.)"

"Besides," she continued lightheartedly, "I was determined. I needed a new home where I could cultivate my extremes, and you…" she bit her lip, "well, you needed me."

Klaus blanched for a second time, recovering only long enough to arch a brow at her.

"Don't look at me like that. You do." Caroline fixed him with a penetrating glance and crossed her arms. "You need me—I can feel it."

Chuckling, Klaus mused over this last comment before billowing around her with an acute gaze so he could assess her, head-to-foot. He took in her green-thorned thumbs, her soil-hemmed gown, her hair woven through with dandelion weeds, and couldn't help but think her an anomaly. A beautifully assertive and _provoking_ anomaly, mind you, but an anomaly all the same.

"Sorry to disappoint you," he said in reply, "but I assure you I require nothing and no one. I never have and I never will. Moreover, the absolute last thing I desire is a spring queen." "In fact," he added with an air of protracted arrogance and a voice which boomed with commanding certainty, "were I so inclined to choose a bride for myself at all—which I neither am nor plan to be (I prefer to rule alone, unchallenged, you see)—what makes you think I'd dare to select one as fresh or as perky as you are, hmm?"

"Wow. Are you so greedy and bitter that you refuse to share the falling granules of Time with me? Seriously!?"

"And what if I am?"

Caroline gaped.

"You know," she narrowed her eyes; placed her hands on her hips, "I rather expected you to be glad of some eternal company down here after all your time alone…but nope!"

"Instead, you're nothing but a stubborn and pretentious _jerk_ who'd rather sift along in solitary sameness, absolutely miserable, than usher in an opportunity for change and cohesion! You're…you're a coward! Terrified of the mere _possibility_ of intimacy, you are," she scoffed. "You want it more than anything, but you're too damn afraid to let yourself have it even though I'm basically gifting it to you for free! And let me tell you, pal," Caroline added with an arm-crossed _humph_ and a pout, "being alone by choice is infinitely more tragic than being alone by command."

"Pretentious jerk, eh?" Something twinged hard against his ribcage. "Coward?" It was his heart. It was his heart twingeing; it was his heart heavying in his chest.

"That's not so awful," Klaus said with forced apathy as he let the stinging truth of her words sink in. "I've been called much worse than that."

"What?" Caroline's brow furrowed and she softened. "By who?" she asked.

"My father…earthlings…tormented souls…" He offered her a tight, painful smile. "Anyone and everyone, I suppose."

"Really?"

Klaus shrugged, glancing away to kick at a rock.

"I'm sorry that's…that's not okay. I shouldn't have—you're not that bad, okay? You're just a little…rough around the edges is all."

"So I've been told."

"Don't let it go to your head or anything, and definitely do not make a habit of infuriating me, because I _will_ throttle you," she said, daring him to try with a look, "but I kind of like that you're enigmatic. You're vexing in a good way, you know? You keep a girl on her toes."

Caroline drifted closer then, and it thrummed something deep inside of him because he could smell her authenticity. He could feel how much she meant what she said.

Soft and delicate, this spring darling was spun from thread that burned gold with candor, consideration and care; so instead of flaming into annihilation when another's anger or pain snipped at one of her split ends, she curled herself around the wound like a compress and shined hope against it until all felt possible. Until all was healed again. Not healed in the way it once was, mind you, but doctored in a way which stitched all the residual agony together, making one feel better about the jaggedness it left behind in the end. More calm and controlled about it, so to speak.

She was nourishing in presence as well. She cultivated growth in a way that required the shoveling up of his old roots to study tangles and bends because she believed it was the only way to see where the neglect first started, because it was the only way for her to calculate when the rot would win out if there were no intervention.

(Not that Caroline wouldn't work like hell before disease encroached that far, of course. Because she would. She _did_.)

Hair trickled over her shoulders like blades of grass bending in the breeze, too. It framed her in shades of mercy so blonde, and so glossy, she reeked of pure sincerity and compassion, infecting everyone she met along the way. And while the trunk of her was deep and grooved with shadows—not to mention full of thick sap Klaus smelled but couldn't see without sawing further beneath her rings, the leaves of her were airy and graceful and constantly swaying in a fashion which he considered to be most distracting. Yet…

Also (much to his chagrin), grossly enchanting.

This young woman, who had appeared in his kingdom without beckoning, was beguiling in an unsettling way. She unnerved him with tender words and mannerisms until the distrustful paranoia in his mind began to thaw…until the cold armor of his chest started to fall with a settled _plonk_ near his ankles.

Something about Caroline primed his ears to listen and consider before he spoke. Where, with anyone else, his mouth wouldn't hesitant to strike out or blast.

So, why the discrepancy? What was so halting about her, how was she so melting?

She was everything Klaus shunned, after all. She was everything Klaus pertained to loath here in this jarring domain…amid these burdensome, endlessly lamenting, clutching souls.

A woman who, with a chirping voice much too high and sweet when she spoke her three-syllable name: _Caroline, Caroline_ ; plus a smile which held the promise of sharp green, yellow, blue and pink demands, and a chin stained with the red-orange juice of a pomegranate, had asked upon her arrival, if he'd clip open the iron cage around his heart for her. Wondering, sanguinely, if he'd make room for a white-blossomed girl with nothing to offer him but seeds.

 _But would he?_

 _Could he?_

Klaus already knew no one wanted to amble through the dank and troubled air of his thoughts, of his kingdom. Just like he understood no creature in existence thirsted for his smoldering artistry, either.

It seemed people feared the scraping of his charcoal fingertips through their heads because he tended to linger over their memories, dreams, and friendships until they shivered or sweat. The cretins never once appreciating the skill it took to sketch out every folded swoop of longing he found wound around their bones like shoelaces. Which was laughable, frankly. Truly laughable. After all, what was so hard to fathom about a king, sentenced to the dark, who knew how to paint others' misery?

All beings shrank away from his hunger, though. They always had. They found fault with his voracious creativity and called him _the Sculptor of Shadows_ behind his back while they tittered.

(And they were always tittering.)

Something unsettled earthen kind about the way his glare ripped them apart to draw what once was in the realm above, to paint that which was no longer their's to hold or hide. With his eyes brushing against all the weight their hearts had to bear in life, he colored all conflict out of them and stroked it into the air for review.

Each piece was unique in its daunting, but exquisite, truth, too. No two stories, no two people, were the same.

Klaus had an innate talent for depicting with whom another's life was shared, for how long it was felt, why it was relished, resented, or missed; and when it all came to an end—but most people hated it. Hated _him_ for his creations. Every single one of them were unable to understand precisely why their old lives must be preserved on ghost canvasses that could echo, but could never be touched again. They couldn't reconcile how much agony it cost him to portray things he longed to experience himself, but most likely never would.

Klaus knew, too, that no soul, dead or alive, cared for knowledge or insight into his bruising history. People preferred ignorance. People preferred not to hear.

It mattered not that his step-father, Mikael the Mighty, kicked him from the cloud-castles of his birth and into the pits of hell because he thought him a plague on the Original family— _a repulsive half-blooded beast_ , _you are; and no son of mine_ , he'd said before punting Klaus into the Deadlands to rot; to be forgotten; to roast in the flames like garbage—only that people distrusted the moonstruck yellow of his seer eyes more. They were eyes which stalked through so much of others' loveliness and adventures, but reflected no such contentedness of his own in their depths.

Unfortunately, suspicion and aversion were the emotions which won out first and foremost among the once-living. It was easier for earthlings to fear him. Loath him. Misunderstand him. It was easier for them to condemn his pledge to preserve everlasting memories in death than to understand that he'd never waltz in the arms of the changing seasons himself unless he did so vicariously: through them.

Perhaps it was too difficult for anyone to believe Klaus might know something of dejection, too? Or grief. Or wonder. Or longing for something _alive._ Perhaps it was impossible for anyone to fathom that the Kindred of the Damned might know something of suffering, too?

"You can't fool me, you know," Caroline cut in like a chirping dove.

"No?"

"No."

"Why's that?"

"Because I…" Eyelashes flicking to his face, gaze unwavering, she shuffled forward with tulips trailing in her wake to place a tentative but steady hand on his chest. "Because I hear the muffled howl of your heart full of holes—how all of that emptiness blows straight through you. It calls out like the notes of a flute every time the wind rustles in the hopes that someone out there will hear it and rush into your arms. That's why I came. I heard it, I felt your aching melody in my veins," she said, her voice as soft as a feather. "I still do."

Reaching for his hand, she beamed up at him with the rose-gold softness of a million suns as she intertwined their fingers in a tender, comforting way he'd never been shown before. The gesture caused Klaus's throat to scratch uncomfortably. His lungs tingled with the warmth of a coming sunrise, making it almost difficult to breathe.

"That doesn't mean you can dethrone me, though, sweetheart," he replied in a low drawl.

"It doesn't, you're right. But if you let me," Caroline said with a tilt of her head and a spreading smile, "I could occupy one next to you so you always have someone by your side?"

Those words, as legend later would claim, changed everything.

For, although she left behind a small lesion on the moon's sooty, weathered face where her perfectly-petalled tip punctured it with grace and light, she showed Klaus the finesse of bending instead of breaking. She replenished his rotted insides with laughter, with hopes of forever which tangled them together like two onyx-shamrock stems dancing in the wind. She taught him how, sometimes, a heart given freely beats louder and longer, feels fatter and fuller, and gushes softer and surer than a heart that's taken forcibly.

Before long, Klaus realized her nectar burned too bright for him to resist the urge to close his eyes and revel in her liquid sunshine taste…so he breathed Caroline in until he was blinded. And here's a little secret:

He never regretted it once, either.

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 **A/N : ****I structured these two chapters so that they read much like a myth or a fairy tale, and in that regard, I believe it's self-contained and won't have any additional parts. But I'd love to know what you think. Thanks so much for reading!**

 **xx Ashlee Bree**


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